Google tackles social networking giants
Launched on Tuesday, the service from the world’s number one search engine allows users to share messages, web links and photos with friends directly within Gmail, the company’s email service.
Google Buzz is also aiming to be compatible with mobile devices such as smartphones based on Google’s Android operating system.
The news is being seen as the internet giant’s effort to take on the might of other hugely popular social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Both sites are increasingly challenging Google for websurfers’ online time.
Buzz will be directly integrated into Gmail in an effort to direct its large base of Gmail accounts towards its own social networking product.
The Gmail base is substantial. It is the third most popular web-based email behind Windows Live Hotmail and Yahoo Inc’s Mail.
Google will roll out Buzz to its Gmail users in the coming days and weeks.
At a press conference in California on Tuesday, Google product manager Todd Jackson acknowledged the move was designed to target the “giant social network underneath Gmail”.
Status messages users publish on Buzz and which are flagged as viewable to everyone will be indexed by the search engine and will be available within Google’s real-time search results service launched recently.
Messages can be kept private by sharing with a group of selected friends and users can also share content from Google properties like YouTube and photo-sharing service Picasa.
Content from services like Twitter can be shared, but users can only view Twitter messages within Buzz and cannot publish new messages to Twitter.
The latest move by Google is not the first time the company has tried to enter the foray of social networking. In 2004, it launched the Orkut social network. While it has been popular in some countries, most notable in Brazil, it has failed to have much impact on the giants of Facebook and MySpace.
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